The blessedness of the righteous discoursed from Psal. 17, 15 /The blessednesse of the righteous discoursed from Psal. 17, 15 /

A Nullifying of self. Magnifying (I may call it omnifying) of God, a making him all in all.

As it imports (which it doth most evidently) a self-annihilation. A pure nullifying of self. 'Tis a continual recognition of my own nothingness. A momently, iterated confession, that my whole being is nothing but a mere puff of precarious breath, a bubble raised from nothing by the arbitrary fiat of the great Creator, reducible, had he so pleased, any moment to nothing again. These are true and just acknowledgements; and to a well-tempered soul infinitely pleasant, when the state of the case is throughly understood (as now it is) and it hath the apprehension clear, how the creation is sustained, how, and upon what terms its own being, life, and blessedness are continued to it; that it is, by its self, nothing, and that it is every moment determinable upon the constancy of the Creators Will, that it is not simply nothing. 'Tis not possible that any thing should hinder this consideration from being eternally delightful; but that diabolical uncreaturely Pride, that is long since banished Heaven, and banished its very subjects thence ⟨p. 124⟩also. Nothing can suit that temper but to be a God; to be wholly independent; to be its own sufficiency. The thoughts of living at the will and pleasure of another, are grating; but they are only grating to a proud heart, which here hath no place. A soul naturalized to humiliations, accustomed to prostrations, and self-abasements, trained up in acts of mortification, and that was brought to glory, through a continued course, and series of self-denial: That ever since it first came to know it self was wont to depend for every moments breath, for every glimpse of light, for every fresh influence (I live yet not I—) with what pleasure doth it now as it were vanish before the Lord!¹ what delight doth it take to diminish it self; and as it were disappear to contract and shrivel up it self; to shrink even into a point, into a nothing, in the presence of the divine glory, that it may be all in all. Things are now pleasant (to the soul, in its right-mind) as they are suitable; as they carry a comeliness and congruity in them. And nothing now appears more becoming, than such a self-annihilation. The distances of Creator and Creature, of Infinite and Finite, of a necessary and arbitrary being, of a self-originated and a derived being of what was from versting, and what had a beginning, are now better understood than ever.